Like the Claudia Winkelman to Top Gun’s Davina McCall, Days of Thunder will always be known as the poorer version of Top Gun, just because both films have the same star, director, plot, characters, soundtrack and gender politics. Despite that, it remains a fun watch.
Tom Cruise plays Cole Trickle(!), a talented NASCAR driver who’s also a loose cannon. Trickle has to enlist the help of psychologist Nicole Kidman to fight his inner demons after a particularly gruesome crash leaves him wheelchair-bound and mentally incapable of getting back into the cockpit. I mean driver’s seat. Needless to say, there’s also a smarmy blond rival, this time played by Cary Elwes out of Princess Bride, who Cruise has to overcome in the film’s climax (yes, technically he was saving Iceman from the Russkies at the end of Top Gun, but the whole event’s basically a way for Cruise to show who’s boss).
Unfortunately, when it comes down to it, Days of Thunder falls short in almost every department from acting to plot, to soundtrack but partially compensates by being far sillier and melodramatic than Top Gun.Everyone, even old pro Robert Duvall, spends practically the whole film shouting. Nicole Kidman is even less believable as a psychologist than she was in Batman Forever, but luckily, she wears a doctor’s coat throughout to dispel any confusion.
Definitely the best, and most laughable, scene is when Cruise and initial rival, Rowdy Burns (played by John C. Reilly, who surely must have been channelling the character when he starred in The Ballad of Ricky Bobby: Talladega Nights some 16 years later) are involved in the aforementioned horror smash, they both end up in the same hospital and, in a display of testosterone run amuck, race each other through the corridors in their wheelchairs. The fact that the whole thing’s played straight as drama makes it all the better.
But the main area that Days of Thunder trails behind Top Gun is in homoeroticism. Apparently the producers cottoned on to the meaning behind the longing looks in the locker room and moustachioed topless volleyball games pretty quickly because such scenes are sadly missing this time round. Instead, in a bid to stress Cruise’s hetero credentials, the team’s bus is pulled over by a hot cop and he has to pretend to be turned on when she gropes him and asks to see his concealed weapon.
Ultimately, Days of Thunder was one of the last gasps of 80’s cinema, and Cruise, hot off an Oscar nomination for Born on the Fourth of July, was already looking to more highbrow fare, which is probably why he has a distracted air about him for much of the film. His new relationship with Kidman would last a decade or so more. Production team Simpson and Bruckheimer, who ruled the prior decade with hits like Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop and Flashdance, took a four-year break after the film disappointed at the box office, but they’d be back too in a few years time to launch the career of Michael Bay, who’d end up building his own franchises.
